Where to promote a side project.
You built the thing. Now somebody has to see it. These are the places indie makers launch, what each one is actually good for, and how to use it without being the person everyone scrolls past.
The pattern that works across all of them: one clear moment, told to people who already care, with something they can try immediately. Stack two or three in the same week rather than spreading ten across a month.
1. Hacker News — Show HN
Cost: Free
Best for: Developer tools, technical projects, anything you can try without signing up.
How: Title it “Show HN: name – what it does”, link to something people can use right now, and stay in the comments for the first hours.
2. Product Hunt
Cost: Free
Best for: Consumer and SaaS products with a clear launch day.
How: Launches reset daily, so pick the day, prepare the gallery and first comment ahead, and tell your own audience when you are live.
3. Reddit — r/SideProject and niche subreddits
Cost: Free
Best for: Early feedback, and reaching a specific audience through the subreddit it already lives in.
How: Read each subreddit’s self-promotion rules first. Posts that tell the story of building it do better than announcements.
4. Indie Hackers
Cost: Free
Best for: Bootstrapped products and founders who share numbers.
How: Write up what you built, what it earns and what you learned; the community rewards transparency over pitches.
5. BetaList
Cost: Free, with a paid option to skip the queue
Best for: Pre-launch startups collecting early users.
How: Submit before you launch, while a waitlist still makes sense.
6. X (Twitter) — building in public
Cost: Free
Best for: Founders willing to post progress, numbers and screenshots over weeks, not one announcement.
How: Short clips of the product working travel further than links. Reply to people in your niche more than you post.
7. Newsletter sponsorships
Cost: Varies with list size
Best for: Reaching a defined audience with one paid placement.
How: Small, niche newsletters often outperform big ones per dollar. Ask for past click numbers before you pay.
8. the1440.com
Cost: $2–$5 a minute
Best for: A cheap, public, time-boxed moment you can point your own audience at.
How: Buy a minute, post “I’m on at 15:04 UTC”, and your name, line and link take the whole front page for sixty seconds. Clicks are published in a public log.
9. Your own launch post
Cost: Free
Best for: Everything above links somewhere: make it a page worth landing on.
How: One clear sentence of what it does, a demo or screenshot, and one call to action.
10. Directories in your niche
Cost: Usually free
Best for: Long-tail discovery and a few links for search engines.
How: List the product in the two or three directories your users actually browse, not in hundreds of generic ones.
A launch week, in order
- Monday: post the story of building it on X and Indie Hackers.
- Tuesday: launch on Product Hunt and send it to your list.
- Wednesday: Show HN, if it is technical enough to deserve one.
- Thursday: buy a minute on the1440.com at the hour your audience is awake and post the time.
- Friday: share the numbers. A launch recap is a second launch.